Technological change gave banks massive new information-processing capacity. The complex financial instruments they produced exuded an energizing charisma.53 The clannish society of the bankers created a social force field of common assumptions and an overweaning superiority complex. They were the masters of the universe. They could not fail. But the basic driver of expansion and change was the competitive search for profit, played out in the force field of financial engineering, transnational capital movement and competitive deregulation between Wall Street, the City of London and Basel.
